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Monday, January 26, 2009

Digesting some recent literature on scholarly information behavior

Carole L. Palmer, Lauren C. Teffeau, and Carrie M. Pirmann, Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment:  Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development, OCLC Research, January 2009.  (Thanks to the JISC Information Environment Team.)  Excerpt:

Research libraries exist to support scholarly work. In recent years, the literature on scholarly practices and information use has been growing, and research libraries should be prospering from this increased base of knowledge. Unfortunately, the profession has no effective means for systematically monitoring or synthesizing the published results. This review begins to address the problem by reporting on the state of knowledge on scholarly information behavior, focusing on the information activities involved in the research process and how they differ among disciplines. It provides an empirical basis for identifying promising directions and setting priorities for development of digital information services to support and advance scholarship....

[Over time], faculty have developed more informed and positive perceptions of open-access and alternative models for publishing, but some scholars still perceive e-publishing to be risky and less rigorously reviewed. Studies have found that senior faculty tend to be more comfortable sharing early stages of work in online venues and that Web presentation and self-archiving is increasing across fields. For example, chemical engineering faculty have been shown to consider digital alternatives highly viable, and some archaeologists are now willing to share field observations on open-access sites (Harley, Earl-Novell, Arter, Lawrence, & King, 2007).

As discussed by Kling and McKim (2000), “scholarly societies play a major role in the shaping of communications forums within a field, both because they are typically major publishers within a field, and also because they articulate and disseminate research and publishing standards for a field” (p. 1312). They note that both the American Chemical Society and the American Psychological Association have had policies directing authors not to put publications on the Web at any stage of production. A survey examining scientists’ use of e-print archives for dissemination reported that they were used by a small number of psychology faculty and less so by chemists who indicated it was “against the policy of the publishers.” Nearly one-quarter of psychology scholars also cited publisher policies as a reason for non-use of e-print archives (Lawal, 2002)....

Recently, the Consolidated Appropriations Act (2008) in the United States mandated that any research conducted on behalf of the National Institutes of Health must be made freely accessible, and other funding agencies like the National Science Foundation have been strong proponents of openly accessible research. Motivated in part by the rising cost of serials and the Web’s influence on scholarship, many universities across the world are developing their own institutional repositories (IRs) to preserve and freely disseminate the work of their scholars. The use of IRs by faculty has been associated with self-archiving behavior (e.g., Kim, 2007; Xia & Sun, 2007). But while one international survey of over 1,200 scholars showed that nearly half of the respondents engaged in self-arching behavior (Swan & Brown, 2005), deposit in IRs has been slow in general. A range of factors have been identified, including faculty not understanding potential benefits and continued preference for traditional peer review venues over open access alternatives (Bell, Foster, & Gibbons, 2005; Crow, 2002; Palmer, Teffeau, & Newton, 2008; Park & Qin, 2007). At the same time, librarians and other proponents stress that IRs, author-pay models, and other open access options are “viable alternatives to the problem of unsustainable journal costs” (Harley et al., 2007, p. 8)....